WARREN ELLIS is a graphic novelist and author of the NYT best-selling novel GUN MACHINE. His graphic novel GLOBAL FREQUENCY is being developed for television by Jerry Bruckheimer and FOX. He is the writer of the graphic novel RED, adapted into the film starring Bruce Willis and Helen Mirren. His next book is NORMAL from FSG.

The Naked President

So a bunch of people online told me I needed to find a copy of Brian Bendis and Mike Deodato’s DARK AVENGERS #16, the final issue of that Marvel series. So I did. And in the back, in a Bendis-written afterword to the series and the huge chain of Marvel event projects Bendis created and that it concludes, I find this:

I’ve joked in the past that I redefined the Marvel universe by doing that sequence in THUNDERBOLTS where Norman Osborn gives a seemingly endless eight-page monologue about how he should be running everything while walking around stark bollock naked…

But, joking aside, I’m actually quite touched by this. Thanks, Brian. It made me smile. I feel like a complete outsider in the commercial comics business, most of the time, and this was just a really nice thing to say about me.

The rest of you shouldn’t worry. I still hate you all.

In other news… god, I don’t have the strength to go through the codebook list again. My pain levels are still pretty high. Add Project SD to the list — though that one might go straight into the Loose Ideas folder, as I’m not sure I’m going to have time to write it.

(Writer Notes: Loose Ideas folders are great. Any half-formed idea that you think might have potential to become something someday? Type it into a .txt file of its own and fling it into a folder marked Loose Ideas. Make sure it’s linked to your backups. A Loose Ideas folder is saving for the future. One day, you’re going to find in that folder the exact thing you need at that moment, whether it be a new project or a bit of business that fixes the script or book in front of you.)